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First physician assistant starts in C-K

ELLWOOD SHREVE eshreve@chathamdailynews.ca
Laura MacPherson, 30, is the first physician assistant to be working in Chatham-Kent. She started with the Chatham-Kent Community Health Centres just over two weeks ago. Here she checks Andria Dyer.

"Basically anything a family physician would be doing, I'm an extension of them," she said.

MacPherson, who is among the second class to graduate from the program at McMaster University, said PAs have only been in Ontario's health-care system since 2007.

"So, it's still new to Ontario," she said, adding PAs have been working in the U.S. for more than 40 years "so it's a well-defined role in their health-care system."

She said her training included doing the same rotation as the medical students at McMaster. One of the rotations she selected was emergency medicine which involved a placement at Hotel Dieu Grace Hospital in Windsor where PAs are on staff.

MacPherson earned both a bachelor's and master's degree, with the goal of being a doctor. With medical school being very competitive, she thought the PA program would be a good plan B.

"It just so happened that once I entered the program and got going, I just absolutely loved it," she said. "It's a better fit for myself and my future plans of having a family and a balanced work life."

HealthForceOntario Marketing and Recruitment Agency was brought by the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care to help the 41 graduating PAs across the province find a job.

Brad Sinclair, executive director of HealthForceOntario, said there were 70 job opportunities available for the graduates.

"There's a lot of interest in the field from a lot of different areas," he said, including hospitals, family health teams and community health centres.

Sinclair said the PA position was created during the Vietnam War in the late 1960s early 1970s working in trauma and emergency medicine settings.

"It was very, very successful there and was imported back into the USA . . . and now what we see regularly in the USA is physician assistants are utilizes across a very wide, wide breadth of speciality areas," he said.

Kristen Williams, chief executive officer of the C-K CHC, said staff are excited to have MacPherson there working as a PA.

She said the position is another "option to offer more care, especially when you look at how human health resources are significantly stretched across Ontario."

Williams said they have spoke with other CHCs who have PAs in their roles for more than a year.

"They say they have been able to increase, significantly, the number of patients a physician sees through the use of a physician assistant working with a physician," she said.